Supervolcano: All Fall Down

Harry Turtledove's name will be familiar to sci-fi fans. He has an easy style to read. This book about the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, is the first of three. The science is accurate and accessible, the characters believable and approachable. Their idiosyncracies make them believable and often endearing. There are a few facts that one might question, but that does not take away from the overall enjoyment of the read. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to live through the eruption, which could happen at any time or long after our time, this is a painless way to imagine surviving the event, as long as you don't own a home in the contiguous states to Wyoming. The imapct on the rest of the country and on the world at large is frightening and thought provoking.A good read and a good introduction to the realities we live with in ignorance.

I wish I liked the characters better. Colin seems to have attitudes more like a generation or two before him, which could be from him being a cop, but I know cops his supposed age that aren't nearly as ossified as he is. There seems to be no popular culture, though the internet experience is well integrated for the younger characters (but no smartphones and no Twitter? Really? And if Vanessa's credit cards are no good, then how is her cell phone still working, with no contract? Plus, even if she cut her card up, if she still has an account at Wells Fargo, she could find it somehow by working with customer assistance, once she reached an Actual Human). Colin and Vanessa once again fail to recognize how much they resemble each other in characters, and I wanted to smack Marshall for hating on his mother the way he does--yeah, yeah, Daddy paid all the bills all those years, while apparently doing squat for his daughter, and it's all so sad that Mommy didn't stick around to wait on him, but Marshall is a special case, always getting subsidized all his life. Gee, kid, grow up some day!). Why Louise is not tracking Teo down with an axe and filing for child support, I do not know; in fact, I'm very surprised the state of California did not require her to do so when she filed for unemployment. I am also a little surprised that beef was running short--California is a huge cattle grazing state, as anyone who has ever passed the feedlot south of Stockton while traveling on I-5 can testify. With more water, the Imperial and Central Valley would be planting fence-post to fence-post, and the hills up on the side would be mobbed with grazing cattle, since the grass would stay green past June.I am also surprised that Hollywood hasn't made a disaster movie about the eruption and hired Kelly as a consultant--it's been a couple of years, at least, and some studio is going to think of it.And I would also like to see what the people at the top are doing; we saw that to good effect in the Lizardwar books.Yes, I'll buy the next ones because I do want to see what comes out; but if there was ever a total disaster in the LA area, I'd count on Colin and Vanessa to survive it (though Vanessa is going to have to stop dating scary men, she's one Mr. Goodbar away from ending up strangled, I think).Oh, yes, the guy with the doctorate in Ancient Greek; he'll probably end up looking up Vanessa again, he can't stop thinking about her all the time. Not a good sign.

So apparently once the Yellowstone supervolcano goes off, the worst most of the west coast will have to worry about is a little snow, higher gas prices and Denny's serving pork burgers with barley buns. That, at least, is the impression I get from the latest novel by master writer Harry Turtledove; a novel that is, sadly, a rare misfire.This story picks up right where part one left off. Colin Ferguson and his family are dealing with the literal and metaphorical fallout of a volcanic eruption that killed about 2 to 3 million people, ejected something like 600 cubic miles of debris into the air and buried a huge part of America's agricultural belt under several feet of ash. It's a global crisis presented on a local scale and that's really just part of the problem.See, at no point do I get a real sense of desperation. Life is basically going on as normal for almost everyone in the book. Ferguson is being a cop and tracking down a serial killer (whose identity I got almost correct), his new wide wants to have a baby, his ex-wife is raising a new baby, their youngest son is helping when he isn't acting like a jerk, their older son is stuck in rural Maine dealing with ten months of winter a year, and their daughter is stuck at a refugee camp where she does unpleasant things to make her life slightly better.Now you'd think that, for example, the son in Maine would be living in desperate times indeed. This does not appear to be the case. We follow him through his second and third winter there (because he's decided not to leave, even though he could at almost any point), and he makes mention, from time to time, about how the moose herds and second-growth forest are thinning out. But despite that, no one seems to be starving or freezing yet. It's a specter that might come later, but isn't here at this point. This removes some of the tension.There's a similar problem with the daughter at the camp. She could, at any point, leave. All she needs to do is contact her father and have him send her money so that she can go home. But, no, her pride won't let her do that. Ok, I suppose I can kind of understand that, but apparently her pride doesn't stop her from performing certain services for various men in order to make her own way along in the world. That the only men she ever meets are apparently the sort who would abuse their power in this way is a given, though I'm not clear why, since I think most men are better than that.Mind you, the problems these two characters face are real, but they aren't that big, and they can escape from them whenever they chose and go back to Southern California where the rest of the family are. Things aren't perfect there, with gas shortages and frequent brown-outs, but they're not that bad. People ride bikes in weather that now resembles Seattle, but that's really it for the problems they have to deal with. We're told, however, that more problems are on the horizon.That's the real problem with this book. We never actually see any really, major, huge problems. Life is basically just going on like normal, and we're told all the time that problems will be coming along down the line, but they never do, or if they do, they don't in such a way as to cause real disruptions for the main characters.It's worth noting that this book suffers from some other problems, too. First off, Turtledove's strength as an author has always centered on him being able to come up with interesting worlds and/or interesting stories and go from there. His strength has never been in his characters. Here has what is basically the real world with a lot more ash, and the result is that his characters problems show through big time. Vanessa and Marshall are characters we spend a lot of time with, and neither are particularly interesting and are also not very likeable. Everyone else are basically just archetypes in search of characterization, and none of them are especially compelling.Second, Turtledove continues his habit of telling us the same thing over and over again. This was excusable when there'd be a year between books and he'd remind us, once, of something he told us in the previous one. That's awkward when you read them one right after another, but not a problem when there's a break. Here, however, we're given certain bits of information repeatedly, throughout the same book, often using the same phrases. That's annoying, distracting and unnecessary.The third minor problem is minor indeed, and that's that Turtledove's personal politics seem to be showing. It's implied that this happens around our current time, and that would imply in turn that the president and vice-president are the current ones. The former we hear nothing from and the latter is presented as rather feckless and foolish. We also hear almost every single character complain at least once about how the government isn't doing anything to help them, which gets annoying, and the only politician we actually see is a noble, hard-working New England Republican. Turtledove also takes every chance to bash on the media, including presenting a CNN reporter as being a vapid idiot. Now I watch CNN daily, and while I have many complaints about the way they cover the news, I don't ever feel that the various reporters are morons.I didn't hate this book. I just felt that not enough happened. We basically end with everyone in slightly different places geographically and the world turning along like it was at the end of the last book. Nothing major happened. Nothing major changed. The volcano is an annoyance, but little more. I sincerely hope that the next book in the series changes all those things, but right now, I'm not hopeful.

I can't agree with the readers who didn't care for Supervolcano, the Eruption, which I read last year. Since then I've caught up with the next in the series, All Fall DOwn, and in both cases have found myself wondering what will happen to the fully realized characters who have to cope with everything from getting away from the eruption at the barest last moment possible, to living in a refugee camp, shooting moose, ducks and deer for food in frozen northern Maine, and coping with an economic situation worse than the Great Depression as well as going without gasoline and electricity much of the time in southern California where the effects of the supervolcano would be less drastic. People who pass up this series are missing out on some good and extremely though-provoking reading.

#2 in the Yellowstone eruption series and the disaster still seems to be having little impact.Vanessa, Colin's daughter buys a used Toyota to get home to California and manages to have it's tank filled for about $100.That works out to some $10 or $12 per gallon in devalued currency, which I would not consider prohibitively expensive.L.A is suffering brownouts and gasoline shortages, but given Alaskan and California's own oil production and the fact that most of the West Coast's electricity is from H.E.P and nuclear I feel that improbable. Gas, oil and coal would still be available from Canada. The following book suggests greater disruption-we shall see.

I have enjoyed all or Harry Turtledoves "history" novels but these two about the super volcano are such a let down. I would almost suspect they were ghost written. Same group of characters in both novels with lots of talking but while the world disintegrates around them there is little description of the passing events, It's as if the disaster is not really part of their lives. What makes this so disappointing is that his earlier series were well written, with lots of action on a grand scale. These are sadly pale imitations. I hate to write a poor review of a writer I admire so much but this book was sadly disappointing.

I love Harry Turtledove books. Yup, Yellowstone has blown it's top and almost destroyed the US. The characters are surviving. That about sums it up for me, because for the first time I found one of his books to be a bit pedestrian. I suppose it might be because it is about survival, but I did expect a bit more excitement, and I thought there might be more happening. The post Yellowstone US has adapted too quickly to the new conditions and I would like to see more surprises in the follow up.There were a few twists which maintained my interest, but revealing them would be a spoiler.

Not up to usual standard.

Great